UPDATE: The upgrade will begin on Tuesday the 29th of March. See here.

UPDATE: We're currently doing some 'R&D' regarding possible security concerns with how we're planning to host the archive and the new forums. While we had planned the forums to go down some time ago in preparation for the upgrade, there's no need for it to go down until these new issues are resolved.

Hello everybody!

You might recall last week I put up an announcement describing the upcoming server upgrade for the GMC, and how it presented us with some interesting options for giving the GMC a fresh reboot. We also mentioned in that thread that we were investigating new forum software.

Well I'm pretty happy to announce that after considering feedback from the community and a long internal discussion, we have decided to take full advantage of the upcoming downtime and move ahead with a complete upgrade for the GMC.

IP.Board has served us well but it is time to move on! So we will be moving to new forum software powered by Xenforo. After looking at many different options, Xenforo stood out to us as being a particularly awesome, proven piece of forum software that's very easy to customize with potential for lots of cool plugins and extras down the line.

What does this mean?

We will have new forums with a new domain and everything will be fresh, new, clean and sparkly!

This forum will become read only and you will no longer be able to log in, but it will remain on the same domain and all links, threads, content, and discussions will be visible and intact.

You will need to make new user accounts on the new forum, no emails, usernames or passwords will be carried forward.

If any users attempt to impersonate or otherwise intentionally claim/block the old usernames of prior forum members this will be dealt with appropriately.

There will be a new, revamped forum board structure and the rules of the forum will be revised and streamlined. Our goal is to create a much cleaner and easier to understand forum.

If you have active, ongoing threads here, contact Nocturne or another moderator when the new forums go live and he will be able to add a link into your old topic here directing users to a new topic you create in the new forums.

What's going to happen and when?

The forums will go down for maintenance, this is expected to happen around Tuesday the 19th (next week) (see update) but we cannot be exact with the timing.

Our estimate is that this downtime will last around two weeks.

After which we will return with our brand new GMC forums, and this forum will be in an archived, read only state.

This place has been around a very, very long time and many developers got their start in video games right here. I'm very glad to see our old content able to remain with its legacy intact. I am also glad and very proud to be welcoming in a new era and fresh beginning for the GameMaker Community and I hope you will all join me in making it the best it can be!

...does it mean that GMC Jam will be carried out in exile, given these two weeks neatly cover the Jam theme voting (Thursday), three days of jammin' (Friday-Sunday) and about a half of voting period? ^^"

Don't get me wrong, I understand that the update needs to be carried out rather soon, it's just that timing is quite unfortunate for quite a bunch of community folks here. You guys probably know better how urgent the upgrade is, but you might want to know that if it was postponed by a week (i.e. no sooner than Tuesday the 26th UK timezone) it'd save us quite a lot of technical trouble (as the theme voting and Jam itself would be carried out on old forums; leaving a Monday should leave enough time to make the necessary topics snapshots), and postponing the upgrade beginning by a month would remove the trouble nearly entirely (as the entries voting and results announcement would happen by that time).

Admittedly, month is quite a long shot, but I hope at least a week is reasonable enough to ask for. I wouldn't want the Jam (5th anniversary Jam, nothing less) to drown in the technical troubles of forums transition.

--- EDIT ---

I think the previous posts are enough of a proof that GMC Jam is quite a concern here.

Personally I'd skip this Jam. It's going to be a poor turnout anyway with the changes, and moving it elsewhere just makes it the "Not The GMC Jam"... Have the next one in 4 months time on the shiny new forum and start things out afresh seems the best idea.

You're asking for trouble. Moving to after the change will mean it's closer to the NEXT one too, which in turn will probably mean a poor turnout for BOTH of them. The first one will be poor because of the changes and people still getting used to things, migrating accounts and topics etc... and the next one will be poor because the last one was so close to it that people can't be bothered. I may be wrong, but seems prudent to me to sit this one out and wait till everything has settled down...

It's unfortunate how the timing lines up, sadly the server update itself (regardless of the forum changes) needs to happen sooner rather than later and this was always going to be a concern. I apologize for not bringing it up in the previous thread as although I was aware of the GMC Jam being soon, the direct overlap did not occur to me.

That said we can't really adjust the timing as I said above. But I would suggest offsetting the date and starting it afresh on the new forums. (Then just offsetting the date of future jams to match, or whatever works best!) I'd argue doing it beforehand doesn't give you much time but it's fully up to those running the jam.

But isn't that what Dadio is stating? Moving the Jam to this weekend so that the jam will be over before the forum locks down? The two week downtime would then serve as the voting period and we'd start off the new forum with the results.

I think you are all missing the point here. The GMC Jam has been losing traction for the last year or so, and I think that this is the ideal opportunity to take a break, consolidate things on the new forum, and then bring it back bigger and better than ever.

Aww, that's sweet. I'd like to thank everyone who has tolerated my voting-rants over the years. :3

I think you are all missing the point here. The GMC Jam has been losing traction for the last year or so, and I think that this is the ideal opportunity to take a break, consolidate things on the new forum, and then bring it back bigger and better than ever.

Maybe; but since when has the GMC regulars be anything other than stubborn? Remember the count to 10.000? I fought to keep that thing alive despite it being literally one of the more pointless games on the site. Traction or no traction, the Jam is very unlikely to go anywhere for now.

I'm not a fan at all of the forum software. Never even heard of it before now.

Can you guys give any specific reasons why you chose this over established, popular software like IP.Board?

A lot of reasons, we've been let down by IP.Board on a number of occasions especially where security is concerned, where controlling spam and bots is concerned, where styling is concerned, and so on and so forth. Xenforo is much stronger on all of these fronts and leaves us less terrified to extend and potentially add plugins etc without the fear that the whole thing will melt.

The new software has all the stuff that's good about these forums, is mobile friendly and more robust all round. It's also super easy for us to add custom colors and style so we're not necessarily stuck with one theme forever and ever.

Has some neat extra built in stuff like thread previews too. Have a mooch around the live demo or even some of the skins at http://www.xenfocus.com/.

>>The forums will go down for maintenance, this is expected to happen around Tuesday the 19th (next week) but we cannot be exact with the timing.>>Our estimate is that this downtime will last around two weeks.

Wait!? This forum will be down for 2 weeks? A little confused here. Will it not be active until the switch is made?

>>The forums will go down for maintenance, this is expected to happen around Tuesday the 19th (next week) but we cannot be exact with the timing.
>>Our estimate is that this downtime will last around two weeks.

Wait!? This forum will be down for 2 weeks? A little confused here. Will it not be active until the switch is made?

Nope it can't be, as the actual physical machines used for the GMC are also being updated and things changed around. SO GMC goes down for about 2 weeks, then the new Phoenix GMC 2.0 rises from it's ashes on a new URL while the old and burnt out GMC languishes in archive heaven.

>>The forums will go down for maintenance, this is expected to happen around Tuesday the 19th (next week) but we cannot be exact with the timing.
>>Our estimate is that this downtime will last around two weeks.

Wait!? This forum will be down for 2 weeks? A little confused here. Will it not be active until the switch is made?

As ideal as that would be it's simply not possible with the work we need to perform, as Mike says above.

So, is there a consensus yet on how the content on the new forums will be organized, as in subforum structure and all that?

It's being streamlined so that most content that currently belongs to sub boards can instead be posted into larger, more central boards. We want to start with as few as possible and build up only as and when necessary. For example, currently we have "Alpha projects" and "Beta projects" as two separate boards when really they both serve the purpose of hosting WIP game threads. This sort of thing will be merged into one central location.

I'm not prepared to share an exact structure as there are a _lot_ of changes that may still may change internally and I don't want to give out a wrong impression or start a large and complex multi-thread debate on it. But if you have particular concerns or questions about specific boards or content feel free to ask and I will share our position on it.

Suffice to say I think it works in everyone's interests and will help make the forums much easier to use =)

The name of the forum won't change. It's the new GMC, but it's still the GMC =)

But if you have particular concerns or questions about specific boards or content feel free to ask and I will share our position on it.

Personally I'm wondering if there will be a "General Discussion" area of sorts, which would house topics loosely or unconnected to Game Maker (like the current Off Topic subforum, but I wouldn't mind a little more direction to it). I'm also curious where "Game Design & Distribution" will be housed.

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This forum is archived. The above content may not reflect my opinion any longer.

Personally I'm wondering if there will be a "General Discussion" area of sorts, which would house topics loosely or unconnected to Game Maker (like the current Off Topic subforum, but I wouldn't mind a little more direction to it). I'm also curious where "Game Design & Distribution" will be housed.

1. Yes.

2. We think the content created there is pretty cool and important to keep. It will have a home.